The night the Queen of the North sank: Jury to decide fate of officer in charge

The Queen of the North lists hard to starboard shortly before sliding beneath the waves.Global B.C.
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Photo by Graham Clarke shows lights of the stricken Queen of the North listing to starboard prior to sinking.GRAHAM CLARKE
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Karl Lilgert, the former B.C. Ferries officer charged with criminal negligence causing death in the sinking of the Queen of the North leaves Vancouver Law courts on April 22, 3013.Steve Bosch
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Karen Briker, former quartermaster aboard the Queen of the North the night the ferry sank, arrives at Law Courts in Vancouver on March 4, 2013.Ward Perrin
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Passengers prepare to climb into lifeboats as the Queen of the North is sinking.Graham Clarke
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An undated handout photo of the Queen of the North ferry. As the hull of the Queen of the North passenger ferry came into contact with an isolated island off British Columbia's north coast, engineer Roger Tew heard the hollow, almost musical ring of something hard slamming against metal.CP
/ CP files

A jury is about to begin deliberations in the case of the sinking of the Queen of the North. Karl Lilgert, a former B.C. Ferries officer, is accused of criminal negligence causing the death of two passengers on the night the ferry sank on March 22, 2006. The trial began on Jan. 21 in B.C. Supreme Court in Vancouver.

The shock of seeing the trees of Gil Island from the corner of his eyes was so great that Karl Lilgert didn’t feel the impact of the Queen of the North hitting the island.

“I had so much adrenalin, anxiety,” said the former Fourth Officer with B.C. Ferries.

Just prior to the collision, Lilgert, who was in charge of navigation at the time, says he ordered his quartermaster, Karen Briker, to switch from autopilot to hand steering.

She told him she couldn’t do it. Lilgert says he made the switch to hand steering and frantically tried to manually steer to port.

The 125-metre vessel went silent on him, then alarm bells starting ringing. He didn’t feel any impact.

The officer’s version of what happened in the few seconds prior to the impact, was not challenged by the Crown during a trial that began in January before a Supreme Court jury in Vancouver. Lilgert, 59, pleaded not guilty to two counts of criminal negligence causing the deaths of two passengers.

But Lilgert’s story of what happened on the bridge leading up to that point was branded a fabrication by prosecutors, who said he was distracted by an affair he’d had with Briker. They allege he was not paying attention, that he failed to navigate the boat.

And it was his failure that lead to the deaths of two passengers — Gerald Foisy, 46, and his partner Shirley Rosette, 42 — when the ship sank in the early hours of March 22, 2006.

While Lilgert claims he didn’t feel the impact of the vessel, passengers and other crew members certainly did.

Ship engineer Roger Tew testified that the ship hit the island like a “big hammer.”

“The ship lurched, rocked over to the port side, rocked back again.”

Tew said the vessel started to “buck and jump” violently, then the noises aboard the ship drifted off and it went quiet.

When Henthorne looked out the window, he saw they were close to land. It was Henthorne’s voice passengers heard on the public address system ordering the 101 passengers and crew to the lifeboat stations.

Looking outside, Henthorne noticed the water line was above the steel band around the ship, indicating water was above the car deck.

“In the simplest terms, it means we’re sinking and there’s no saving the ship,” said the captain during the trial.

At 22 minutes past midnight, Second Officer Keven Hilton had radioed for help.

“Traffic, traffic: We have run aground south of Sainty Point, several miles south of Sainty Point. Stand by for position.”

When the ship hit land, crew member Lynn Cloutier felt herself “going crazy.” She was trapped inside her cabin and the water was rising fast.

A locker in her cabin fell down, jamming her door and preventing her escape. She got up on her bed and saw a flash and a picture of her grandchildren.

“They said, ‘Grandma get out. We need you.’”

The petite woman screamed and pushed, and was eventually able to lift the locker and push it over.

“Everything was floating in my room. The water was up to my mouth and I opened the door. Thank God I opened the door.”

Cloutier has not worked for B.C. Ferries since the accident.

Seven years on, the memories of the horrific night moved passenger Lawrence Papineau to tears and anger on the witness stand, even before he took the oath to testify in court. Papineau, who said the crew was good “except the guy driving the boat” and fixed his eyes on Lilgert, was asleep when the ship ran aground.

“All of the sudden: boom, bang, shudder,” said Papineau, an Ontario man who had travelled to B.C. with his wife to show off her native crafts at a conference in Kamloops before boarding the ferry in Prince Rupert.

“I could hear steel ripping. I know what it sounds like when you rip steel apart, so I knew it was bad right off the bat.”

Passenger Kirby Jackson, who was travelling from his home in Prince Rupert to Port Hardy to work at a fish farm, was about to light a cigarette on the outside deck of the ship when he heard the unmistakable sound of waves lapping against the shore.

“I took a look around the side and all I saw was this island coming toward us,” Jackson, 41, told the jury.

“That’s when we hit, and I looked down and saw the beach right there. You could feel the whole boat shaking.”

The impact knocked Jackson around and he hit his shoulder on a nearby door.

Passengers started streaming out of their cabins and toward the lifeboat stations. They were in all forms of dress, including pyjamas.

Crew members began lowering the lifeboats full of passengers to the water.

“Everybody was scared,” said Bruce Boughey, the ship’s electrical engineer. “One of the crew members was sick.”

Quartermaster Briker could be seen in a fetal position, testified one of the crew members.

A number of fishing vessels responded to the ship’s radio call for help, along with vessels from the nearby community of Hartley Bay.

The lifeboats and life rafts were brought together and a number of head counts began. Confusion reigned as to the numbers — ranging from 99 to 103.

“It was futile to keep an accurate count of how many people got into each boat,” said crew member Derek Sweet, who recalled the flotilla of rescue vessels bobbing in the midst of wind, rain and commotion.

Passengers and crew watched as the Queen of the North began sinking.

“It’s almost like watching the movie Titanic,” said former chief engineer Brian Erickson. “The bow rose up. You could hear the cars and everything crashing inside and then it just dropped.

“What we were watching was pretty awesome and then it was gone, the ferry was gone.”

Life jackets started popping up out of the water as a large debris field formed around the rescue boats.

At the helm of a coast guard fast-rescue craft, Morgan Chisholm saw a glow of lights reflecting off the cloud as he arrived on the scene.

He was certain it was the Queen of the North but the light suddenly disappeared.

“I just assumed [the ferry] had gone behind a mountain. About two minutes later, the [coast guard ship Sir Wilfrid] Laurier called us and said the Queen of the North was gone, which put a bit of fear into us.”

By the time the coast guard arrived, boats from nearby Hartley Bay had responded to the call for help and were transporting passengers and crew to the small native community.

Most of the passengers and crew were taken to Hartley Bay and the rest were taken aboard the coast guard cutter Sir Wilfrid Laurier.

There was uncertainty as to whether everyone was accounted for and the coast guard ordered a grid search of the waters off the north end of the island for any sign of survivors. No one was found.

Court heard that there were different tallies for the passengers and crew at Hartley Bay and aboard the Laurier. It wasn’t clear exactly when, but by 7 a.m., more than 6½ hours after the accident, it was known that passengers Gerald Foisy, 46, and Shirley Rosette, 42, were missing.

The 108 Mile House couple are presumed to have drowned. Their bodies were never found.

Exactly what happened to them remains an enduring mystery — one the defence raised — whether the two victims were genuinely lost aboard the vessel.

But during a day of emotional testimony, Crown called the couple’s family members who said they’d never heard from their loved ones since the ferry sank.

Brittany Foisy, 22, described her relationship with her father Gerald as being “very close, warm, happy.”

“He had told my sister and I, we were his world. He’d do anything for us.”

Prosecutors opened their case by arguing that Lilgert had completely failed in his job navigating the vessel along the Inside Passage south of Prince Rupert.

They said he’d failed to make a routine turn as the vessel emerged from Grenville Channel into Wright Sound and that the Queen of the North had steamed straight into Gil Island.

Court heard that Lilgert and Briker had ended an affair two weeks before the voyage that night. They were working on the bridge together for the first time following the breakup.

Briker claimed that she and Lilgert had only a brief conversation about her purchasing a house with her husband.

On the stand, Lilgert claimed that they’d only engaged in small talk.

But the Crown grilled him about the affair, noting that the pair had continued having sex with one another even after Briker’s husband discovered the affair.

The two had had sex aboard the ferry during the affair, although Lilgert claimed that it was always when both were off-duty.

The Crown suggested that Lilgert still had strong feelings for her and cut short his break to join her on the bridge.

“When you got to the bridge — whatever happened between you, whether it was sexual, whether it was an argument, whether it was a heated discussion — you just weren’t paying attention to navigating the vessel,” suggested Crown counsel Mike Huot.

“I disagree,” Lilgert replied, who broke down in tears several times during his direct examination.

Lilgert claimed he missed the routine turn because he was trying to avoid a tugboat and had made a second course alteration to avoid a second vessel in Wright Sound.

The Crown dubbed the second vessel the “ghost vessel” or the “mystery ship,” questioning whether it actually existed.

The Crown’s lawyer accused Lilgert of “fabrication,” of concocting virtually everything he said up to the point where he saw the trees of the island.

In his defence, Lilgert’s lawyers have said poor weather, bad training and unreliable equipment were contributing factors to the tragedy.

They also argued that the couple might not have drowned, citing the testimony of several witnesses who said they might have seen them following the collision at Hartley Bay. Lilgert maintained he steered a course to run parallel to Gil Island.

12:26 a.m.: Queen of the North crew advises Prince Rupert Traffic that the vessel is aground and requires immediate assistance.

12:27 a.m.: Prince Rupert Coast Guard Radio broadcasts a mayday that the vessel is listing and taking on water rapidly.

12:38 a.m.: Passengers and crew begin gathering at muster stations and preparing to climb into life rafts and lifeboats.

12:53 a.m.: The master and remaining crew members abandon ship.

1:13 a.m.: After hearing the mayday call, residents of Hartley Bay mobilize a number of small boats from the community to help. The April Augusta arrives at the scene; the lights of the ferry are still visible under the waves.

1:38 a.m.: The Queen of the North vanishes under the waves, 130 kilometres southeast of Prince Rupert in 430 metres of water in Wright Channel.

1:44 a.m.: The Lone Star, a fishing boat from Hartley Bay, reaches the scene and the crew begins pulling people from the lifeboats and taking them to Hartley Bay.

1:54 a.m.: Commanding officer of the Queen of the North radios the Sir Wilfrid Laurier Coast Guard vessel, which is heading to the scene to co-ordinate activities, to say the crew is not confident that everyone on board the ferry has been accounted for.

1:56 a.m.: Canadian Coast Guard fast-response craft from the Sir Wilfrid Laurier arrives at the scene.

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